Religion Dispatches
…alist, performance artist, and mad scientist would all fit as well. In his latest work lies an invitation for not just cloistered specialists, but anyone and everyone, to participate. It used to be the exclusive domain of men of leisure to pursue God or science or art because they alone had the necessary combination of time and education, Keats argues, but now most people in the modern world have a modicum of both. Yet Keats, 39 years old, feels t…
Read More…and intelligent design. The terms of the law gave various appointed boards power to determine what textbooks are acceptable for adoption. Those who have been battling the creationists in this latest round didn’t hold out much hope for a victory, so the vote was quite a surprise. The whole drama reminds me of this old magazine cover from The Onion….
Read More…them. Too bad that the military’s own survey of the troops show that this latest scare tactic from DADT opponents for what it really is: a lie. Leaked results of the military survey showed that 70 percent of soldiers said they “expected positive, mixed or non-existent effects from lifting the ban.” Since the survey doesn’t show the results Perkins and others like Arizona Senator John McCain want – then the survey must be flawed. ”[T]his study was…
Read More
…e pimped out on the internet by perverts. Now, social media has become the latest “sinful” activity. Perhaps Rev. Miller should get on the phone to Sarah Palin, and counsel her about her kids’ activity on Facebook. Bristol Palin found time from her “Dancing with the stars” practice to get on Facebook with her sister Willow to ride on a friend who had the chutzpah to say “Sarah Palin’s Alaska is failing so hard right now.” Willow’s response was to…
Read More
…Catholic Worker, because priests had authored three of the articles in the latest issue—clearly more than she was looking for. This brings us to the election of Archbishop Dolan as president of the USCCB. As previously noted, the archbishop is a cordial and well-spoken man, so I’m sure he was gracious to his defeated opponent, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson. But his election is not a good sign. As the New York Times mentions, this is the first ti…
Read More
…ishers simply wait for the temporary order to expire. Reading parts of the latest round of outings Kiyimba shouts, “They do not understand what they are doing! They are ruining the lives of these young people. These are just kids, nineteen or twenty years.” In Uganda, Kiyimba says, “everybody knows everybody for four square miles.” When someone’s name appears in the paper, “life is over.” While he was in the U.S., three high school boys in Kiyimba…
Read More
…erosexual Anglican Bishop Christopher Senyonjo. His inclusion was only the latest example of the persecution that the bishop has faced for speaking out on behalf of the country’s embattled homosexual community. The Ugandan Rolling Stone (no affiliation to the US publication), which has outed almost 30 gays and lesbians over two of its issues, epitomizes the heightened discrimination that gays and lesbians and their allies have faced following the…
Read More
…ysical law,” the physicist Stephen Hawking writes in The Grand Design, his latest bestseller, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow, “so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is an illusion.” Similarly, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, contends in his new book The Moral Landscape that “no account of causality leaves room for free will.” He adds, “Our belief in free will arises from our moment…
Read More…or the middle-class without keeping those for the wealthiest. To mark this latest capitulation framed as a compromise, a letter to the Washingtonians… To the moderate political classes, religious leaders, and activists who are tempted after the Republican gains in the 2010 midterms to call for more compromise, civility, and government sensitivity to the plight of “the least of these”: Late in the year 2000, I stayed up late into the night watching…
Read More
Last Friday, Brandon Bitner was the latest in a still-growing list of teenagers who have committed suicide for reasons related to sexuality. A few weeks ago, another young gay man from New York City, Joseph Jefferson, hung himself. Joseph, who graduated from Harvey Milk High and worked at Gay Men of African Descent on HIV prevention, left a final Facebook message before he took his life: “I could not bear the burden of living as a gay man of colo…
Read More